“... the 1960s and 1970s, the works at Ravenscraig employed as many as 13,000 men. Deborah’s father, John, was a miner’s son and left school at 14 to work at Colvilles, the mill that made the girders that hold up Tate Modern. He lost his nerve, Deborah discovered, after rescuing a fellow worker who had been nearly cut in half; so he ran away to Essex, where he ...”

“... 1640, 24 years after Shakespeare’s death. That edition, however, involved wholesale revision. John Benson, the publisher, capitalising on the undiminished sales of Venus and Adonis, produced a volume of what looked to be not old-fashioned sonnets but new Shakespeare love poems. The transformation involved both format and erotics: many of the sonnets are ...”

“... the whimsical German Romantic novelist Jean Paul Richter, lyrical and discursive by turns, a major influence on Sartor Resartus, and Marx now noted and deplored the pervasive effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally gone mad, and former disciples such as Matthew ...”

“... people for more than a century.To later chroniclers, in particular the Elizabethan martyrologist John Foxe, the Lollards were heroic proto-Protestants who had advocated for an English Bible long before the arrival of the first printed versions in the 1520s and 1530s. Lollards deplored the wealth of the Church, its love of opulent decorations and neglect of ...”

“... hanging out with pretty girls’: for example, ‘Marsha, blonde, buxom, in reality an econ major but she looked like a psychology major.’ Mark, Eduardo and their erstwhile friends expected their site ‘to mimic what went on at college every day’, where students ‘meet people, socialise, converse, sure’, but ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... were to be seen.And yet Empson’s work, for all his denials, connects him strongly to most major 20th-century movements of criticism and theory in English and other languages – not because of his influence on them or their influence on him, but because his preoccupations are central to any sort of ongoing thought about literature. We can’t tie him ...”

“... American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review of Books – hailed Ammons as an ‘American original’. ‘I was born big ...”

“... battle. Had he known the film Full Metal Jacket, he would have routinely shouted: ‘What is your major malfunction, numb-nuts!’ He was often funny – in the right mood he liked jokes and repartee – but even when he was guffawing over his cherished absurdities it was rarely relaxing to be in his company. People have often asked me how I was able to quote ...”

“... As the Marxist Pierre Kast put it in 1951, in the second issue of Cahiers du Cinéma,‘the major problem is acquiring the wherewithal, and the restrictions implied by this have absolutely nothing in common with the kind of formal constraints imposed by the fugue, say, or the heroic couplet.’ Eisenstein’s strange, thrilling book, a montage of ...”

“... John Weightman, reviewing Jean-Denis Bredin’s monumental work in the Observer, wrote of the Dreyfus Affair that ‘it was perhaps a good thing for France that the abscess burst when it did, because this brought tensions out into the open and revealed the “undeclared civil war” which would need to be resolved in the 20th century ...”

“... summery verse-makers eliding into Book-of-the-Month novelists. (It’s curious that one of the major lubricants of Isis-incubated reputation, Granta, began as a folksy Cambridge periodical.) The only Cambridge poet (two slim volumes from Ferry Press, plus the mimeo’d Ouch from The Curiously Strong) to put enough of a dent in multinational budgets to ...”

“... had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim problem ...”

“... Latin and published, it becomes clear how strange the poet’s Christianity was. The poet is John Milton, and the work is De Doctrina Christiana.De Doctrina Christiana matters because it mattered to Milton. You can ignore it and still enjoy his poetry, but if you become seriously interested in Milton your interest will sooner or later extend to his ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”